Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/49

 ON SLEEPING SICKNESS AS MET WITH IN UGANDA, ESPECIALLY WITH REGARD TO ITS TREATMENT.

By ALBERT R COOK, B.A., B.Sc, M.D., Church Missionary Society, Mengo, Uganda. {Friday, October 18, 1907.)

Like many other tropical diseases, sleeping sickness has come into prominence lately, partly owing to the increased study devoted to all tropical ailments, and partly owing to the importance it has assumed and the economic interests involved by its attacking a flourishing and important British colony. In the last seven years some 60,000 natives have died from this cause in Uganda, and their deaths involve a double loss to the Government. In the first place they were for the most part men in the prime of life, paying hut-tax, etc., and thus directly profitable to the Administration, as well as forming no inconsiderable part of the wage-earning members of the community, and their deaths also directly decrease the by no means large popu- lation. These considerations, important as they are, are not, however, so serious as the well-grounded fear that the disease will go on spreading, and involve first the sur- rounding countries, and afterwards whatever parts of Africa are inhabited by the tsetse fly.

Here let me diverge a moment to note the interesting development of the study of tropical medicine. When I left for Central Africa in the autumn of 1896, but little interest was taken in tropical diseases by the profession as a whole ; the fascinating storj^ of the evolution of the malarial parasite was unknown, and the intense importance